This is still a half-formed idea in my mind but...
I see English home educators wanting to do SOMETHING and having lots of ideas about what they might put in a consultation response and at the same there are Welsh home educators who feel they ought to be doing the consultation but particularly if they have younger children it's hard to find time to organise their thoughts or even actually to LOOK at the consultation proposals because they are so scary, let alone put into words the impact of red tape, bureaucratic regulation and oversight and having to pass an inspection every year to be allowed to continue...
So I'm thinking is there any way that individual English home educators who are getting to grips with the Welsh stuff, who are brimming over with things to say...could somehow gift their early consultation notes to Welsh home educators, because some Welsh home educators are isolated or a bit stumped - particularly as I say if they have younger children and don't have direct experience of the arguments we rehearsed and the points we made in England against "light touch changes to monitoring" in 2007 and against the Children Schools and Families Bill in 2009-10, and they could really use something as a springboard for their own ideas.
Not sure how this could be done, but instinctively I feel it's worth a try...
I know that some home educators in England and Wales are adopting a Just Say No approach, and are opposed to the idea of spending time getting bogged down in the small print of consultation responses, as though anyone would ever pay any attention, since the Government has already decided what it's going to do...and that in any event, participation is a snare and a delusion since it allows the Government to say that it has reached a view "after consulting"
I have a certain sympathy with this viewpoint but...any plan which involves mass action or inaction is a bit of a non-starter with home educators as everyone will just do their own thing anyway...
So my two pence, for what it's worth...I would definitely say don't answer the actual QUESTIONS, but instead when you tackle the consultation, think of the points you would want to make if you were debating with...someone working in [insert value-neutral supermarket chain] or with your mum or with a friend who is a teacher...and shoehorn those points into the consultation response boxes wherever you can.
And yes, I'd say home educators ARE the usual suspects, which is why at the Wrexham Workshop I was asking for example whether people had any ways of shaping the local authority responses, or whether they could encourage acquaintances who might not otherwise have considered responding to say their piece about self-motivated home educated teens compared to spoon-fed pupils for example....or whether the parents themselves would be able truthfully to tick other boxes than home educating parent.
This is all based on analysing the effectiveness of consultation exercises in the past and securing maximum impact and coverage.